“FIRST of all, I'm a victim of the terrorism of October 7,” Liora Eylon said as we began speaking early on Thursday morning. “My son was murdered. I myself was in my safe room for 35 hours while there was a war going on around me. Terrorists were trying to open the door, shooting inside my house, killing my neighbours.
“Sixty-four of my community were murdered, 19 were kidnapped to Gaza. Two of them are still there. Now, I'm a refugee in my own country.”
But despite the horrors Hamas inflicted on her closest family, Eylon is part of the small but growing push within Israel for the recognition of a Palestinian state.
Born in Israel to parents who fled Germany and Austria during the height of Nazism in Europe, Eylon said she had for seven decades watched as Israel “tried war too many times – and it hasn't worked”.
Eylon is one of some 7000 Israeli citizens to have put their name to a petition started by Zazim – a campaigning community with around 400,000 members – calling for international recognition of Palestine.
Raluca Ganea, the director and co-founder of Zazim, said that the right time had come to recognise Palestine – with the topic set to take centre stage at a high-level UN General Assembly this month. She argued that doing so would undermine both Hamas and the government of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, two ostensibly opposing sides which “have the same interests”.
Ganea pointed to the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a far-right ultranationalist because, opposed by both Netanyahu and Hamas, “he was promoting a peace process and an end to the occupation”.
“Hamas isn't interested in a two-state solution. Netanyahu isn't interested in a two-state solution,” she said. “A Palestinian state alongside Israel is actually the answer both to Hamas and to Netanyahu’s almost endless war.
“[We have to] make people understand that this actually means more security for the Israelis. Recognition of the Palestinian state means also recognition of Israel.”
Eylon also brought up the assassination of Rabin, noting of those who had incited the killing: “It's the same people that were once terrorists, now they're in government.”
“They don't represent me,” she added. “This government that is ruling us right now is the most extremist and undemocratic ever in Israel, and I'm 72 years old, so I've seen enough.”
“One of the reasons that Netanyahu and his ilk, especially the religious right, want Hamas in power is because they won't be able to effectively negotiate a two-state solution like the Palestinian Authority,” he said. “Frankly, they don't want to.”
Kipnis said that he had planned to visit his home kibbutz of Be’eri over the October 7 weekend, but a last-minute change of plans had kept him away.
“I hate viewing that as lucky,” he went on. “Real luck would be having my parents still alive and having the whole war not even begin – but that wouldn't have been luck, that would just have been sound policy.”
Kipnis said that the longer the conflict in Gaza drags on, the “less and less and less sense it makes” and the more the Israeli public view Netanyahu as dragging it out for his own political ends.
“I think that eventually two states will be established; it mostly depends on when,” he said. “The longer it takes, the more victims there will be, because this is the only really viable solution.
“Often, the conflict is viewed by people on both sides as having only extremists on the other side, but I think that the fewer they will become on one side, the fewer they will become on the other.”
The idea of extremism feeding extremism, with each side becoming more and more entrenched, was also spoken about by Eylon, who said that children in both Israel and Palestine are “educated to hate each other, even when they’re a baby”.
“This is a horrible thing, but this is how people in Israel think about Arabs, and this is how Palestinians think about Israeli citizens,” she said. “They're dividing us into ‘us’ and ‘them’ in every aspect of our lives, and they're doing it very efficiently, unfortunately.”
Eylon, whose son Tal left behind a wife and three children after his murder on October 7, said she had joined an Israeli-Palestinian bereaved family organisation.
“We believe that if we talk, things will end," she said. "We sit together and we share our pain and our hope for peace.
Zazim hope that, if they can show Israeli support for a Palestinian state, it will help to bring about more mutual understanding, more dialogue, and, in time, a peace process.
Kipnis pointed to a 2022 speech at the UN by Israel’s then-prime minister Yair Lapid, who said that a two-state solution was “the right thing”.
Polling showed the speech had made Palestinians “much more positive about being able to achieve it”, Kipnis said, adding that international recognition of the Palestinian state would have a similar effect “even if it is just a symbolic gesture”.
However, Ganea said that while recognising Palestine is “of course in itself just a symbolic gesture, that's also our job – to make sure that it does mean something, that it is a step to end the war, an important step towards ‘the day after’.
“So even though it is a symbolic gesture, it can have – and we should make sure that it has – implications in the real world.”
Another of the central arguments made against recognising Palestine, as articulated by Netanyahu himself in response to the UK Government, is that doing so “rewards Hamas’s monstrous terrorism”.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer had said that the UK would recognise Palestine unless Israel caved to a list of demands, including allowing more aid into Gaza, an end to illegal settlements in the West Bank, and signing up to a long-term peace plan.
Ganea said that the UK Government's framing was “very wrong” in that it presented recognising the state of Palestine as a “threat” to Israel.
“It's actually not a threat to Israel, it's the best thing that can happen for both people,” she added. “You should do it anyway, even if the war ends.”
The UN’s 80th General Assembly begins this month, with France and Saudi Arabia set to host a conference on Israel and Palestine – and the recognition of the latter as a state.
Ganea said the UN summit represents an “opportunity to put this agenda on the table”, adding: “I think having the voice of the Israeli public saying that and echoing that in New York can really help in changing that framing.”
Israel is credibly accused of committing genocide in Gaza by experts including the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. The International Court of Justice found it “plausible” that Palestinians’ right to be protected from genocide was at risk in a provisional ruling handed down in January 2024.
Netanyahu, who has ruled Israel on and off since he was first elected prime minister in 1996, is wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“If you are a state and you have agency, it's not only the sovereignty of the state but it's also the sovereignty of the subject. As a people, it can be a lot harder to dehumanise [them],” Ganea added.
The use of the term genocide remains controversial in Israel. After the rights group B’Tselem published their conclusions saying it was taking place in Gaza, Netanyahu’s government said the “accusation is obscene, baseless in both fact and law, and only emboldens Hamas”.
Asked about her use of the term, Ganea said she would rely on the conclusions drawn by experts she trusted, including at B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (PHRI).
“I don't think it was like that from the beginning, but it is definitely now,” she said. “The policy is to conquer Gaza, one of the social destruction and annihilation of people, to starve them and to basically take their humanity. Then, it is genocide.”
